


A Guide to Caring for Your Very Own Spider-Boyfriend

by absolutelywrite



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 13:57:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/absolutelywrite/pseuds/absolutelywrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or 5 times Gwen took note of Peter’s new spider-instincts and 1 time she didn't care one bit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Guide to Caring for Your Very Own Spider-Boyfriend

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://spiderkink.livejournal.com/1612.html?thread=3148#t3148) at the Spider-Man Kinkmeme.
> 
> I know I'm posting it a year late, ha, but I kind of just wanted to put it up on AO3 anyhow. Enjoy!

– ( 1 ) –

 

The first time he clambers in through her window (back when her father was still alive  _oh god_  –) Gwen doesn’t think much of it and her reaction is mostly fond incredulity. Peter Parker has always been kind of awkward, a contradiction in terms: inviting one second, all bashful intellect and charm, yet crushingly antisocial the next. Gwen knows this because they’ve been at the same school since elementary, orbiting each other like planetary bodies, even if it’s only recently that they’ve actually been brought into close contact with each other.  
  
(Maybe they’re not planets. Maybe he’s the sun and she’s Icarus: she can feel the wax burning her fingers as it boils and _melts_ –)  
  
So when he taps on the window pane, it’s just one more piece in the puzzle that is Peter Parker. It doesn’t hurt that she finds his awkwardness unbearably endearing.  
  
The second time, she assumes it’s to protect his secret identity from her father (“And every day for as long as I can remember, I haven’t _known_ –”) but the question rattles around in her brain long after he leaves. And Gwen is, will always be, a scientist at heart: she can’t leave a curious phenomenon like this unexplained, not when there’s research to do.  
   
It starts with an idle google search, then a couple of wikipedia pages on different species of arachnids. Suddenly she snaps out of research mode, realizing she’s been at this for hours and has dozens of tiny tabs open, all of them devoted to articles and studies on the behavioral patterns of spiders. It’s enlightening. It also feels kind of invasive and Gwen almost wishes she had admitted her suspicions to Peter beforehand.  
  
So she closes all the tabs, shuts down her computer and goes to bed, determined to put this out of her mind. It’s all conjecture and guesswork, anyways. There was never really any evidence, two instances of awkward behavior is hardly even worth investigating.  
  
But no scientist in her right mind can leave a fascinating hypothesis untested. Two times could easily be a coincidence. _Three_ times, however…  
  
After the third time he raps his knuckles against the glass and slides in through her open window, instead of taking the elevator and coming in through the front door, Gwen gets an empty notebook from her desk and makes a chart. In one column she writes: _Male spiders of certain species do not weave webs of their own, but may be found lingering around the corners of a female’s web, wary of being mistaken for prey._  
  
In the second column she simply draws three tallies.

 

 

– ( 2 ) –

 

It’s hard for Peter to talk about what happened with Dr. Connors, mostly because he still blames himself for giving a good man the key to his undoing (Gwen thinks it’s also the reason he seems to have given up his hunt for Uncle Ben’s killer – Peter has now witnessed firsthand how totally and utterly obsession can ruin a man). But there aren’t any secrets between them, not since Peter caught her with his web and pulled her close, that night on the roof.  
  
(Well, except for the one, but the secret of the promise her father exacted from him had hung around both of their necks like an anchor, pulled them down, _down_ , until they were sinking, _drowning_ –)  
  
After he tells her about his stake-out in the sewers, weaving a network of webs to trap the Lizard, Gwen makes another row in her chart: _Most web-spinning spiders lack keen eyesight and therefore rely on the vibrations of struggling prey, caught in the strands of their web, to hunt._  
  
It’s followed by a single tally. But really, Gwen thinks there should be one for every crook and criminal in the city, because what no one seems to realize is that New York is Peter’s home; therefore, the entire city of New York is Spider-Man’s web.  
  
Gwen recalls that night on the roof, when she had realized just how much trouble she was in, just what it would _mean_ , falling for a boy like Peter Parker. That night where she had gone back inside, gripped by cold, clammy uncertainty, while he swung through the night, saving lives (and she had hoped and hoped that he would make it back, make it _home_ –).  
  
What she remembers most clearly though is the look in his eyes, when he had cocked his head as though he was listening to something so faint no one else could hear, and turned back to her, apologetic, before vaulting off the rooftop. Because that single look tells her all she needs to know.  
  
New York is Spider-Man’s web, and the people in it are under his protection. Peter Parker will never stand by and watch as an innocent man is gunned down in the streets (not ever, not _again_ –). He won’t. He _can’t_. Because Gwen knows that Peter is still haunted by his uncle’s shadow, that every person he can’t save wears his uncle’s face as their heartbeats slow to a stop and they bleed out on the pavement.

 

 

– ( 3 ) –

 

Watching Spider-Man swing across the sky is like watching fireworks: quick flashes of color that draw your eye, vibrant flickers of red and blue movement spiraling away into the night.  
   
It’s a blink and you miss it kind of sensation. Every time he drops her off at her place and jumps from the rooftop, free falling through open air, Gwen keeps her eyes wide open until they prickle with discomfort and Peter has long since faded from sight.  
  
(Fireworks burn bright for mere moments and then fade away into darkness _forever_ –)  
  
She worries a bit about how visible he is, how the primary colors of his outfit don’t offer any camouflage or safety in the shadows. It makes her wonder what exactly made him choose that pattern, those glaring shades. It’s not until they’re out one night and he starts showing off a bit for her, doing back flips from handstands, his eyes dancing with mirth as her own eagerly follow his movements, that she makes the connection.  
  
In the safety of her room, Gwen once again pulls out her little notebook. She smiles a little to herself, ignores the nervous fluttering of her heart, and transcribes: _Though smaller than females of his species, the male jumping spider is gaudier than his counterpart and may be ornamented with spots of bright color, in an effort to attract a mate._  
  
Instead of a tally, she draws a little heart in the second column and instantly feels ridiculous. She’s not a little girl with a schoolyard crush (except for the part where maybe, she kind of is): she’s not going to start doodling hearts with _PP + GS_ drawn in the centre, or writing out _Gwen Parker, Gwen Parker, Gwen Parker_ in artistic, painstaking cursive.  
  
She may not be a schoolgirl with a childish infatuation, but she is Gwen Stacy and she is dating Spider-Man. So instead of covering her textbooks with heartfelt sketches of her and Peter, she does something a little more subtle.  
  
Her wardrobe changes, ever so slightly. Whereas before she had favored subtle earthy tones, now her outfits seem mostly comprised of bright, colorful ensembles. And if she happens to wear a blue dress with a red ribbon in her hair more often than not, well. It’s probably just a coincidence.

 

 

– ( 4 ) –

 

Gwen doesn’t think Peter has even noticed just how much his new spider instincts have been affecting his behavior. Or this is what she thought until she realizes that he has actually been trying to tone it down, to act as normal as possible _for her_.  
  
She has noticed of course, how he sometimes gets a little twitchy, limbs operating with sporadic movements, how he always seems to be anxious to move around, until he feels her eyes on him and stills, restless energy thrumming through the lines of his body. She’d assumed it was an outward expression of his teenage awkwardness and left it at that.  
  
But more and more often, she sees this strange twitchiness when it’s just the two of them relaxing together. Whether they’re eating takeout and joking around in his room, or curled around textbooks on the floor of her family’s apartment, sometimes she’ll hand him something and when their hands brush, his fingers jerk awkwardly, skittering away from her. It’s like that night on the roof when he had looked so anxious, like he would rather be crawling down the side of the building than standing there trying to explain to her – _oh_.  
  
The next time it happens – he’s sprawled on her bed, reading through a biology assignment and she’s sitting at her desk, passing him her notes while she fills out applications for other internship positions in the city – she levels the look at him. The look that says, _I am not a moron, so don’t you dare treat me like one, Mr. Second-in-our-class Parker._  
  
“You can, you know,” she casts a quick glance at the open door to her bedroom before bringing her hands together, fingers outstretched, one thumb touching the forefinger of her opposite hand before twisting to bring her other thumb and forefinger together and repeating the motion, as she mimes a climbing movement.  
  
His eyes go wide for a second and he too shoots a furtive look at the cracked door. Gwen’s mother and brothers are home tonight (she’s not allowed boys in her room with the door closed, even though that was mostly her father’s rule, she can’t ignore it just because _he’s_ – _fuck_ –) but they don’t tend to bother her when Peter is over.  
  
With one quick movement, his socked feet land on the wall of her room and he propels the rest of his body up and over until he’s crouched near the ceiling. He shuffles around until he’s settled comfortably (albeit upside down) in the corner above the foot of her bed then smiles at her crookedly.  
  
“How am I supposed to reach your notes now?” he teases, but what he means is _thank you_.  
  
Gwen throws the notes at him with an exasperated huff and he laughs as he uses his reflexes to snatch them out of the air.  
  
Later, after Peter has left to swing his way home, Gwen gets out her secret notebook again. The latest entry reads: _Spiders seek out elevated areas to weave their webs to aid them in catching their flying-insect prey as well as minimizing their vulnerability and the likelihood of being squashed on the ground._  
  
Beside it she doodles a little circle with eight stick-legs. Her lips twitch into a silly grin as she looks down at it: her itsy bisty Spider-Man.

 

 

– ( 5 ) –

 

They live in strange times. Spider-Man isn’t the first superhero to emerge from the chaos of social turmoil and economic downturn; he won’t be the last, either. But as the heroes who came before him, and even those who came after, start forming teams, partnerships and alliances, Gwen starts noticing patterns.  
  
Different heroes have different skill sets and different skill sets are best suited to dealing with different villains. Furthermore, superhero teams are necessary only for situations of extreme danger, threats on a global scale that no single hero can deal with on his or her own.  
  
Peter though, is alone. Gwen isn’t sure if it’s the Daily Bugle’s smear campaign against him or a subconscious psychological reaction in the people of New York (more than one in two people are arachnophobes, after all) but Spider-Man doesn’t have a lot of fans. Most people seem to think he’s either an attention-seeking vigilante or a flat-out menace to society. Despite this, there is an underground sub-culture movement that has adopted him as an icon for the underdog, for everyday heroes. They spray paint giant red spiders all over the city; people sporting t-shirts and buttons have been popping up out of nowhere. Gwen has no idea where they’re getting the merchandise – there must be a website selling it or _something_.  
  
But all the slander and accusations take their toll. There isn’t a team in the city that wants to be associated with Spider-Man. The Avengers’ press agent (some guy named Coulson, Gwen thinks) makes a statement where he announces that, _no, the Avenger’s certainly do not condone unlawful vigilante activity_ and _yes absolutely, they all urge Spider-Man to turn himself in_. Gwen, however, has looked up the video for that press release online. And she’s seen Coulson (who looks more like a secret agent than a press agent) at the microphone giving his statement, while Tony Stark rolls his eyes in the background and unzips his jacket to reveal a Mark of the Spider-Man t-shirt underneath. Captain American elbows him in the ribs, expression stern, but he grins unrepentantly at the cameras nonetheless.  
  
It’s nice to know that even if he didn’t make the cut for the team (Gwen has a sneaking suspicion that SHIELD is aware of exactly how old Peter is) he has some friends in the Avengers. She knows that they do team-ups sometimes – not officially, of course – and she just hopes that they have his back like she knows he’ll have theirs.  
  
Still, it’s kind of a surprise when she gets invited to a team dinner.  
  
There’s more to the story than that, of course: all of those internship applications that she sent out came back and she accepts a position at Stark Industries. From there, she somehow ends up as the lab assistant of Bruce Banner. Well, all right, it’s more complicated than that: it involves a super-villain attack that hits one of the R &D floors of Avengers Tower, mass panic, failure of the security protocols… and Gwen, intern extraordinaire, is somehow the one who takes charge of the evacuation. Even though she’s only done it once before (the memories from that night at Oscorp are all too clear in her mind, brittle and sharp as knives, tearing her to _pieces_ –) it seems like second nature, directing the other interns and even her superiors towards the exits that are still operational.  
  
So when the Hulk arrives on the scene and everyone else cowers on the floor in fear, she simply orders him to go support the south wall where the explosions hit.  
  
And he goes.  
  
The other employees look after him warily, but Gwen Stacy faced down the Lizard on the worst night of her life, and she’ll be _damned_ if she can’t handle a big, angry, green guy.  
  
It’s later, when the Hulk has reverted back to Dr. Banner and she’s dropped her lab coat over his thin shoulders, blushing furiously (all of this technology and they can’t get the guy some stretchy pants? Good god) that he offers her a job.  
  
(She asks afterwards and he tells her that he doesn’t remember much of what happens when he hulks out, just still images and brief flashes of action and violence – but he remembers a girl in a room full of people who had stood up and been unafraid.)  
  
So it’s not like she gets the invitation out of nowhere. Peter’s secret identity is safe, no one even knows about her connection to Spider-Man, she and Dr. Banner are just working late one night when he casually suggests that she stay and meet the team. The opportunity is too priceless to pass up, so she accepts. She doesn’t even realize until they step off the elevator into the main living area and Bruce has already introduced her to all of the Avengers that Peter is there too. Well, not Peter exactly…  
  
Spider-Man.  
  
For a second, both of them freeze. They haven’t talked about this, it’s never been an issue how they should act if they ever encounter each other in this kind of situation. But after a moment of awkwardness, Gwen’s brain kicks into gear.  
  
She cuts Dr. Banner off mid-introduction. “Spider-Man! This is great, I never got to thank you for that time at Midtown Science.”  
  
Even without being able to see his expression, Gwen can tell that he’s utterly gob smacked by her sudden appearance and _thank god_ Peter is wearing a mask because he has the _worst_ poker face. He recovers in time to rub the back of his neck and sheepishly reply: “Shucks, it was nothing.”  
  
_Shucks_. She’s going to hit him for this later, who says shucks anymore, honestly.  
  
The look Bruce gives her is a bit nonplussed. “You two know each other?”  
  
“Well, no,” she hastily admits, not wanting to give Peter a chance to screw up their cover story. “But he stopped the Lizard from rampaging through my school.”  
  
In the background, she thinks she hears Tony and Hawkeye griping about how Spider-Man gets all the babes – though Hawkeye lets out an undignified yelp when the Black Widow steps on his foot. Oh, she and Peter are going to have _words_ about this.  
  
Thankfully, Captain America takes that moment to usher them all into the kitchen so that they can start preparing dinner – Gwen tries not to dwell on the surrealism of this moment. She offers to help but is pushed gently down into a chair, as the others move around her and bicker amongst themselves. She wishes she could remember anyone’s real names since it’s incredibly awkward having a conversation with people she only knows as Black Widow or Hawkeye or, oh hell, Captain America. Bruce she knows, and Tony, since he’s always drifting in and out of the lab where she spends most of her time these days. Then Thor sits down next to her and she forgets to feel awkward as she listens in rapt attention to the story of bravery, camaraderie and adventure across the nine realms that he’s recounting for her.  
  
When she finally emerges from his epic tale and looks around, the sight that meets her eyes takes her breath away.  
  
Tony and the Captain are sitting with her and Thor around the table, a broken StarkPhone between them, as Tony waves one screwdriver in the air wildly and tries to talk around another one that he’s gripping between his teeth, at the same time. The remaining Avengers are clustered around the kitchen counter, Bruce and Hawkeye handling the actual meal while Peter and Black Widow cut ingredients. Well, what they’re doing certainly isn’t how Gwen and her mother prepare ingredients, but they make it look so effortless. Peter tosses a red pepper over his shoulder and the knife in the Widow’s hand blurs as she slices it in midair, then the pieces are caught in Spider-Man’s webbing and snapped back up onto the counter with a flick of his wrist. They’ve got a sort of assembly line going and they function with the smooth ease that comes of practice and familiarity.  
  
It’s all so beautifully domestic. She wishes she had a camera.  
  
But none of that compares to how Peter looks right now. Even with the mask on, she can tell from the way it stretches across his cheekbones that he’s grinning with wild abandon. For an ugly instant, Gwen is almost jealous. But then the feeling fades and she just wishes Peter would smile more often these days.  
  
When she gets home that night, she sits at her desk for a while, notebook open and pen in hand, but she makes no move to write. Not yet.  
  
Gwen had always thought that spiders were isolated creatures, loners. But she remembers reading about social spiders (and god, _that_ had given her nightmares, massive webs filled with thousands of spindly legs) and in a moment of perfect clarity, something slots into place in her brain.  
  
The Peter Parker in her memories is a solitary, socially awkward little boy. But since he was bitten, it seems that he has desperately been searching for something, some way to connect himself to the people around him. And Gwen wonders if this recent quest for camaraderie, for friendship, for _connection_ , is perhaps more than just loneliness.  
  
Finally, after staring blankly at the two columns on the page for what seems like ages, she simply writes: _Social spiders spin their webs together, they hunt together, they share food and shelter – the burden of survival is shared amongst an entire colony and they live, or die, together._  
  
She doesn’t put anything in the second column. Gwen has long since stopped keeping score, stopped monitoring Peter’s behavior like a lab experiment. This isn’t a game, it’s her _life_ and, more importantly, it’s _Peter’s life_. She just needs to be there for him, catch him when he falls, save him when he needs saving, and hope that it’s enough.  
  
Sometimes, she thinks that it’s for the best that Spider-Man isn’t an Avenger. Let them handle international conflict and invasions from outer space – Peter’s all about saving regular people, with regular lives and hopes and dreams. Gwen thinks she might be just a little bit in love with him because of it.  
   
(It’s the other things, the way he smiles when he looks up and catches her eye unexpectedly, the way he laughs for her, without reservation, no holding back… she might be a lot in love with him just for being who he is.)

 

 

– ( +1 ) –

 

The days pass, and after a while Gwen forgets almost completely about her little tally chart in that secret notebook. But it comes back to bite her in the end.  
  
She remembers reading: _Two major components of spider courtship rituals are patterns of movement and patterns of touch – the male may forewarn the female of his presence by plucking a strand of her web and creating a series of vibrations through the web that she will innately recognize._  
  
She regrets ever researching arachnid mating habits and wooing rituals – she’s almost positive that she’s only noticing behavioral parallels because she read about these things first and is reverse-diagnosing them in Peter.  
  
Still though… Gwen does recognize the sound of Peter’s knuckles rapping against the glass of her bedroom window.  
  
Tonight she’s home alone, her mom and brothers are out at the movies, and so when he reaches for her, she doesn’t gently push him away. They’ve been dancing around this for months, so caught up in the trappings of day to day life – classes at Midtown Science, her internship with Dr. Banner, his superhero gig – that any time they can spare to be alone usually ends with both of them passed out on the couch together.  
  
So tonight, when he reaches for her, thumbs tracing idle patterns on her hips, she clutches his shoulders just as tightly. And when he tilts his face to ghost butterfly kisses down her jaw line, she ducks her head and crushes their mouths together.  
  
He vibrates under her fingers and she smiles against his lips.


End file.
